693-Structure-Guided Discovery of Viral Sponges
This research identifies and validates new families of phage-encoded antidefense proteins that allow viruses to bypass bacterial innate immunity. By analyzing common structural traits, researchers developed a computational pipeline to discover viral proteins that either sequester or enzymatically degrade nucleotide signaling molecules. This approach led to the identification of Sequestin and Lockin, two "sponge" protein families that neutralize the Thoeris defense system, and Acb5, an enzyme that disables CBASS immunity. Structural modeling and biochemical assays confirmed that these proteins…
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